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apigy
selfstarter
Ruby2012–2024
apigy / selfstarter

selfstarter

Roll your own crowdfunding

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
9Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Roll your own crowdfunding

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-12-12 20:02:05 UTC to 2024-03-12 15:50:46 UTC.

0123452012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
pmg·Mar 12, 2024
Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme. After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat of losing their payment partners that caused Kickstarter to ban all sales of hardware [2]. They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m, including Bitcoin support in 2012 [3]. Which is to say decentralized payment systems solve a lot of problems for crowdfunding platforms. Specifically Kickstarter missed out on the explosive growth that GoFundMe cap
Read the rest
tured because Kickstarters payment processor said “no” and GoFundMe’s said “yes”. But switching to Celo or some other platform in 2021+ feels too little too late for a platform whose culture has ossified. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/09/03/16... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/the-story-of-lockitron-cro... [3] https://github.com/apigy/selfstarter/pull/22
In The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain
dpryan·Jan 17, 2013
I believe there's an opening for a crowdfunding model focused purely on hardware startups. Perhaps some of you are already working on it. App.net, Lockitron and most recently Lumawake helped kick this off, with selfstarter. We contributed some changes back to help push it along: https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter There are flaws with this approach (no third party payment verification, no established network of donors). Which leaves room for further improvement. Kickstarter is clearly focused on creative (which they're doing incredibly well with). The 2012 Kickstarter summary didn't mention any of the massive hardware projects.
In The Problem with Kickstarter

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